For busy weeknights, cooking with the Instant Pot is a good idea to keep dinners mostly hands-off and easy. This Instant Pot honey garlic chicken is a great make-ahead meal prep recipe. We provide slow cooker instructions too, so you can make this recipe either way!

Meal Prepping Over The Weekend

It’s no secret, we are chronic meal planners. Both Justin and I are very routine and habit based, and we love having our meals all planned out in advance, shopped for and prepped to the extent we have time. It just makes the week go so much smoother, and makes us feel like we are able to just enjoy one another in the evenings rather than hustling to figure out what’s for dinner and then run to grab ingredients, etc. By the time we get to Monday, it’s all taken care of and pretty much smooth sailing for the week, at least when it comes to food! Recipes like this Instant Pot honey garlic chicken are perfect for meal prep because you can easily turn it into a lunch or dinner as needed during the busy week.

Lunch Or Dinner – It Doesn’t Even Matter

We love the versatility of this honey garlic chicken. It’s super easy to pair with just about any veggie, greens and even plain white rice if you tolerate it (or cauliflower rice). Here’s an example of a simple way to use it as the protein in a pretty typical bowl at our house – use mixed leafy greens (or any greens of your liking), some pickled veggies (we used green beans from Justin’s mom) and avocado with that yummy Everything But The Bagel seasoning from Trader Joe’s! If you haven’t tried that seasoning yet, just do it! You will wonder how you ever lived without it! We ran out of sauerkraut, otherwise I would have added a big pile of that on there too, but we ran out…so you know real life stuff. You can use whatever greens and veggies you have on hand. Leftover roasted veggies would be great, too!

Instant Pot Or Crockpot

We love our Instant Pot since it cuts down on cooking times, but this honey garlic chicken can also be made in the crockpot just as easily. Use whichever you have or prefer. Either way, you will end up with delicious shredded chicken that you can use to pair with whatever veggies, greens or sides you prefer! I’m thinking now that it would be a great one to stuff sweet potatoes or squash with. I’m making a mental note to try that out real soon!

More Instant Pot protein options

Your Turn To Try Our Instant Pot Honey Garlic Chicken

Go ahead and bust out either your Instant Pot or Crockpot and make this honey garlic chicken! Then, take a photo and show us what you paired it with. Tag us on Instagram @realsimplegood, so we can see! Also, let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. And make sure to give us a follow if you don’t already – let’s stay connected!

That’s great to hear! So glad you guys enjoyed it! We love making it for the two of us as well just to have something on hand in the fridge for lunches/leftovers. Thanks so much for trying this one out! 🙂

We usually just eat this over some greens and maybe some kraut. You could also pair it with some roasted veggies or eat it in a lettuce shell as a taco. Check out some of our side dish recipes here:https://realsimplegood.com/category/sides/

I just made this dish and found the liquid didn’t cook in very well. There is plenty of liquid but the chicken is somewhat bland. The sauce has a great taste but I would have loved for it to cook into the chicken better. I’m wondering if perhaps it needed to cook longer— in the recipe above, the cook time is listed as 35 minutes up top but in step 3, the cook time is written as 22 minutes, which do you usually follow?

We noted the cook time as 35 minutes because it takes a little over 10 minutes for the IP to come to full pressure. Setting it for 22 minutes should be fine. Sorry to hear that your chicken didn’t turn out as you would have liked. Did you shred the chicken in the IP? That’s what we do and we also spoon some of the juices from the IP onto the chicken when serving. That gives it some extra flavor. You could also marinate the chicken in the sauce if you’d like to “set in” the flavor better. Thanks for trying our recipe and leaving a comment!

Just finished this in the instant pot. Super easy recipe and fantastic chicken! I added half julienned green pepper and half a brown onion cut the same way, and sprinkled some coarse sea salt and fresh ground black pepper so it would look like I knew what I was doing. I strained it after deboning and shredding the chicken, made one more pass for cartilage or bone pieces, and it’s soaking in the leftover sauce – ready to go for tomorrow.

Hi there! Manual release is the same as instant release, so once the IP timer goes off release the pressure. Also, please see step #4 in the instructions. You shred the chicken once it has cooked in the IP right before serving. Hope that helps!

However I find the the instant pot recipes call for such huge amounts.

I’m a complete novice with this. I have half the amount of chicken (1.5lbs), so I’ll halve the amount of ingredients and do I halve the amount of cooking time? Or is this where I press the poultry button and it calculates it accordingly?

I’ve no idea how to go ‘off piste’ with cooking times… any help would be greatly appreciated

I have made this recipe a dozen times in a handful of months. It’s incredible, easy and versatile. I have also shared with so many people who concur it’s a WINNER! It does leave some extra liquid behind as a previous poster noted, but after we shred it, we just put it back int pot to soak up the goodness and it enhances the flavor! Leftovers are even better.

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